The "mystery" of Lincoln, just down the street from Dickinson

On this American presidential holiday weekend, just after the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, images of the 16th president flicker across cable news channels along with tales of economic stimulus plans, Oscar buzz and the usual lot of bipartisan bickering. Google News finds 3500 stories about Lincoln in just the past 24 hours, from his top ranking among all American presidents to his relevance to citizens today.

But amidst all the Lincoln-related pixels, ink and airtime, I just want to stop and reflect on a related something recently mentioned by one of the top podcasters around, Christopher Lydon.

In the latest episode of his "Radio Open Source" series, Lydon leaves behind a fragment of a thought that deserves a little more consideration. Lydon interviews Lincon's literary biographer Fred Kaplan:

Fred Kaplan’s literary life story of Lincoln is conceived as a mystery, not unlike the riddle of Shakespeare: how did the child of illiterates in a farm culture become an obsessive student and master of language in every form, from his tavern tales to the Second Inaugural?

Shakespeare and Lincoln, Lydon says, pose similar riddles. How can the brilliance of these men's careers be reconciled with their own humble origins? This is how the Shakespeare authorship issue is typically framed.

And, I say, it's the wrong question.

Not to diminish the mystery of Honest Abe, but there's nothing I'm aware of in President Lincoln's writings that suggests any biographical portrait other than the Abraham Lincoln bio we're all familiar with. Lincoln was a writer -- and a president -- of supreme intellect, possessing a deft literary mind and oratory gift. Nothing a student of any decent high school American history course doesn't already know. But Lincoln's personal biographical journey, from rural Kentucky and Illinois to Springfield to Washington, D.C., is reflected, throughout his life, in the products of his pen.

Lydon himself quotes two fine examples of this fact, in letters Lincoln wrote to friends Mary and Joshua Speed from 1841 and 1855, about the fundamental primacy of liberty and about Lincoln's visceral reaction to watching newly purchased Kentucky slaves being dispersed into the deep South.

Both excerpts offer lyrical examples of Lincoln's supremacy as a craftsman of prose, grabbing a reader by the shirt collar -- while still somehow managing to wax philosophical about big political ideas. Both excerpts are also creative expressions based in known biographical facts about Lincoln's life -- his doings, his friendships, his whereabouts, etc.

So where's the mystery?


I write these words literally just a mile from the homestead of Emily Dickinson, a poet of practically unparalleled genius in her time who spent the vast majority of her life in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, writing some 1800 poems but only publishing 18 during her lifetime.

The mystery of Dickinson's boundlessly fertile imagination, like that of Lincoln's prolific muse, is in a primal sense, the mystery of literary creativity itself: Where does this amazing stuff all come from? Dickinson barely saw much of the world beyond western Massachusetts, and yet her works touch lives all over the planet and will continue to do so as long as there are eyes to read. Immortal, worldly verse from a very mortal, unworldly source.

And, wow, can the noodle salad of these kinds of musings go on for ever and ever amen.

There's nothing wrong with pondering such imponderables. But recognize the Whence Springs Creativity question for what it is: An open invitation for speculations that can't satisfactorily be answered or proved or disproved.

The "riddle of Shakespeare," however, is something else altogether. It's not about the nebulous origins of an individual's creative imagination but rather about the character of its content. What's the story this person's writings tell? And is that story consistent with the life story we've been told about the person? Does the literary biography jibe with the literary output?

In the cases of Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson, I submit, the bottom-line answer to this simple question is Yes. With Shakespeare it is No.

The primary objection in the authorship issue is not that Will Shakespeare of Stratford had humble origins that therefore disqualify him from writing any kind of immortal plays and poems. (Cf. the Snobbery red herring.) Rather, it is simply that, the life story being told in the Shakespeare canon belongs to somebody else.

That's where the focus belongs. And so long as the "riddle" of the Bard remains expressed as a negative (unsophisticated Will of Stratford could not have created the sublime Shakespeare canon) rather than a positive (boundless connections between de Vere's life and the Shakespeare plays and poems), I think, we lose.

Perhaps, by the time the Dickinson bicentennial rolls around in 2030, this little problem will be all sorted out. (Is 21 years too much to ask for a full resolution to the authorship question?)

Meantime, happy 200, Abe. May your mysteries continue to amaze and befuddle us for many generations to come.

Pounds Sterling and the Shakespeare Brand

(Creative Commons image by unknowndomain)

On the online magazine Suite101, writer Linda Sue Grimes has been posting some short summaries of scores of Shake-speare Sonnets, keeping a watchful eye on the peculiar parallels between Edward de Vere's life and times and the events and times chronicled in those immortal poems.

Grimes' latest piece, posted yesterday, is on a personal favorite of mine, Sonnet 111. Sonnet and clips after the jump.

SONNET 111

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew'd;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

Lines 2-6 (ital.) contain a key part of the entire Shake-speare story, neatly summarized in iambs: The author's "harmful deeds" leads to "public means" to "provide for [his] life." But going on the dole breeds "public manners" which brings about a "brand" that almost subdues the author's nature. (In his 30s, de Vere went on the public dole, receiving a royal grant of a thousand pounds per year for the rest of his life, a grant that King James renewed during de Vere's final year on this mortal coil.)

It's amazing, really, what an unadorned confession those five lines are.

Here's Grimes:

His name becomes “a brand,” quite possibly the reason he used the pseudonym, “William Shakespeare.” At least this way, he keeps a portion of his privacy and dignity.

He reveals to the Muse that his nature, while working the plays, takes on the tincture of theatre life, “like the dyer’s hand,” and he begs the Muse to take pity on him and “wish [he] were renew’d.”

More of her sonnet-by-sonnet discussions here.

Rip a Hole in the Sky

Here is an (x-ray) picture of the remnants of a star that exploded in November 1572 -- one that shone so brightly in the immediate wake of its supernova that it could even be seen in broad daylight. Astronomers have now studied the remnants of "Tycho's Supernova" (so named for its most celebrated observer, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe) and published their results in the journal Nature.

As some astronomers have been arguing for more than ten years, Tycho's Supernova also makes an appearance in Hamlet, when Bernardo stands on the Elsinore battlements and describes the brilliant blaze in the sky at the time Hamlet's father's ghost appeared to him:

BERNARDO Last night of all, When yond same star that's westward from the pole Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where it now burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one, - [enter GHOST]...

Tycho's Supernova was a foundation-shaking event, ripping a gigantic hole in the static, geocentric view of the cosmos that then prevailed. Nothing could explain how a "new star" might emerge, or how it might even shine during the daytime. Scores of astronomical observations were recorded across the European continent in 1572, coordinated by Tycho at his royally subsidized observatory in Denmark.

Edward de Vere's brother-in-law Peregrine Bertie visited Elsinore in 1582 on a royal embassy to the King of Denmark, a visit that included a dinner that Bertie recorded with Danish courtiers, including two named Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. The King brought Bertie out to Tycho's observatory to meet the fabled astrologer -- as practitioners of the nascent science were then known.

Conventional scholars have long wondered how the author of Hamlet could have known about peculiar details of Danish royal culture, including King Claudius's bizarre drinking ritual involving firing cannon blasts with every downed shot of liquor, a true-to-life drinking game of the convivial Danish king at the time, Frederick II.

Add to that list a supernova observed in great detail by the Danish courtly astrologer, a supernova that, like Hamlet's ghost, tore down the veils of polite society and upended the very order of the -- courtly and physical -- universe of its time.

Shylock, the Elizabethan Financial Crisis and the Invention of the Stock Market

The story of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice comes from an Italian book (Il Pecorone, or The Simpleton) published in Milan in 1558. No English editions of the Milanese tale are known. Orthodox scholars are left to assume English translation(s) popped into Britain long enough for the Bard to get his hands on it -- then, having discharged their duty to posterity, the books completely disappeared from history. All in a day's work.

The first story of the fourth chapter ("day") of Il Pecorone recites the tale of a rich merchant of Venice who takes out a loan from a Jewish moneylender so the merchant can seek his fortune on the seas. If the merchant defaults on his loan, the Jew takes as collateral a pound of the merchant's flesh. Pecorone's story continues on from here involving the wooing of a "Lady of Belmont," who disguises herself as a lawyer to extract her new fiance from the bloody, contractual bonds of his ultimately defaulted loan.


Like any other text in the Shakespeare canon, Merchant of Venice is conventionally seen as a work-for-hire play. Through perhaps the same London bookseller who provided Shakspere with all his books (the same one who erased any trace of them from the historical record), the Stratford actor acquires Il Pecorone or some "lost English translation." He reads the book and thinks, 'Hey, I'll write a play.' Inspiration strikes. And like Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, the Bard dashes off another masterpiece at the desk of his second-story walkup.

Meanwhile, in the alternate universe of the Oxfordian theory, the author, de Vere, writes plays based on his own life experiences, telling stories that personally mattered to him. (Scandal! Heresy!) In the case of the Merchant of Venice, the tie-in comes with de Vere's sometimes reckless financial investments in voyages to discover the fabled Northwest Passage to China. In 1578, for instance, de Vere laid out an exorbitant £3000 -- the lion's share of it bought from a merchant named Michael Lok -- to underwrite a shipping venture that ended up mining an inlet of a bay in what is now the Canadian province of Nunavut. The explorers returned to England with more than a thousand tons of ore that they claimed contained untold riches. Instead, after the adventurers had set up smelting works on the Lower Thames, the rock proved to be worthless. The investors were ruined.

In 1580, de Vere's private secretary Anthony Munday published his one and only novel, Zelauto, which tells a variation of the Merchant of Venice story. (A London pamphleteer Stephen Gosson wrote the year before about a play treading the London boards called The Jew that Gosson said "represent[s] the greediness of worldly choosers and the bloody minds of usurers." Some scholars argue that Zelauto was a re-working of The Jew.) Munday dedicated Zelauto to de Vere.

As seen from an Oxfordian vantage, The Jew, Zelauto, and Merchant of Venice all arguably draw elements of inspiration from the same source: Edward de Vere's experiences in the wake of his £3000 shipping venture loss at the hands of Mr. Lok. (Recall that shipping investor Antonio in The Merchant defaults on a 3000 ducat bond with the financier Shylock.)


Here is where very recent history comes in. Last month, Penguin published Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's omnibus book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. C-SPAN Book-TV aired an hourlong interview with Ferguson (streaming video of which can be viewed here or here).

The interview is absolutely fascinating, in and of itself, as a primer on the origins of money, bonds, banks, stocks, stock markets and the financial industry. And even just on the level of pure storytelling, it's also quite a riveting tale.

As Ferguson says, the very first publicly-traded company in history was the Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century. This Amsterdam-based venture invented the notion of stocks as an easy way to finance their shipping voyages to far away lands. And the notion of limited liability -- shielding investors from assuming any losses above and beyond the amount of their own individual investments -- also appeared around the same time to protect its existing investors and further encourage others to speculate some of their own captial.

"Since capitalism is about taking risk in pursuit of profit and weighing the rewards against the risks, then limited liability and the joint stock companies are critical inventions," Ferguson said.

In other words, the very biographical wellspring of inspiration for The Merchant of Venice -- those financially risky maritime investments that sometimes decimated its investors -- just a few decades later inspired Dutch traders to invent two of the most important cornerstones of free market capitalism today.

De Vere's and his fellow investors' financial crises in the failed Elizabethan Northwest Passage ventures did not bring about any economic innovations that would alter the course of history, as the Dutch did.

But, in the end, fodder for immortal Shakespearean drama is probably reward enough.

=====

UPDATE (Dec. 16): Just posted on the Internet today is a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece on a recent New York moot court re-trial of Antonio v. Shylock. A plurality of the justices found for Shylock. A propos of the above discussion, the following snippet is excerpted below:

“The trial was a travesty,” [First Amendment expert Floyd] Abrams said, of Shakespeare’s litigation scene. “Beautiful sometimes, funny sometimes, and ugly sometimes, but that judgment is not something that we sitting here today can enforce.” [Federal appeals court judge Richard] Posner said, “I’m particularly critical of Antonio’s conduct. His failure to insure his cargoes was completely irresponsible.”

Edward de Vere - The Elevator Pitch

(Creative Commons image by Marco Wessel)

The case for Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" is one without a smoking gun. It's a frustrating fact of researching, writing and speaking about the authorship question that our story lives or dies according to circumstantial evidence. You convince people by bombarding them with "awful funny coincidences" (as Orson Welles called them) between de Vere's life and the Shakespeare canon. And at some point you reach a threshold. Where that point is varies from person to person and audience to audience.

So it's good to have to really cut to the chase once in a while. In July, participating in a Shakespeare authorship debate (at Bally's Hotel in Vegas, no less), I had barely 20 minutes to make my whole case.

Tomorrow morning (Friday) at 9:30 eastern time, on the Bill Dwight Show on WHMP-AM in Northampton, Mass., another 20 minutes of airtime, at most, is what we have to tell the whole story of "Shakespeare" By Another Name -- and, with screenwriter John Plummer's help -- about the recent option of SBAN as the basis for a possible television series.

I'm a talker. I start off in one place and end up, who knows how many minutes later, way off in tangent-land. The kind of message discipline that the short-and-sweet format requires is really good practice. I need more of it.

It looks like Bill posts mp3s of his recent programs on the WHMP website, so although I cannot find a link for live-streaming from the station. I hope to be able to update this post with an mp3 link to hear the "Shakespeare" By Another Name chat as it played out.

Just need to remember three sentences: Keep. It. Simple.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the audio archive of the Nov. 21 Bill Dwight show. Click on the "Audio MP3" button and fast forward to the 23 minute, 30 second mark when the discussion about "Shakespeare" By Another Name begins.

"The Other Shakespeare"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karen Evans, Karen Evans Management (Plummer, Biederman)
(323) 933-9218
Jessica Regel, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency (Anderson)
(212) 794-1082

"THE OTHER SHAKESPEARE" OPTIONED FOR TELEVISION


NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 30, 2008 -- Imagine if an Elizabethan Hamlet had actually written Hamlet, or if a love-scarred veteran of Montague/Capulet street wars in London had in fact written Romeo and Juliet. A recent book, newly optioned for television, tells this very story.

Shakespeare's celebrated plays are, according to the 2005 book "Shakespeare" By Another Name (Gotham Books), remarkably autobiographical. And, say screenwriters John Christian Plummer and James Biederman, this astonishing (and controversial) new perspective also holds tremendous promise for some ground-breaking television.

Plummer (recent subject of a PBS documentary about his critically acclaimed production of Twelfth Night for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival) and Biederman (veteran executive producer for television series such as The Kids in the Hall and The Whitest Kids U Know) are currently developing several projects for television and collaborating on an unrelated feature screenplay for Academy Award winning producer Wendy Finerman.

Their new television series option of "Shakespeare" By Another Name, says Plummer, "is the sort of thing Shakespeare -- de Vere -- would be proud of. We're using a mass medium to tell an incredibly elevated but at the same time tremendously entertaining story. And at the same time, we're taking on one of the world's biggest sacred cows."

"Shakespeare" By Another Name tells the epic life story of the courtly poet and playwright, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, both in Queen Elizabeth I's inner circle in England as well as across Europe, visiting many of the Italian and French cities and locations that would later be immortalized under the byline "Shakespeare." A growing number of scholars have suspected de Vere was in fact the author of the Bard's plays and poems.

"Shakespeare" By Another Name author Mark Anderson says that in book-signings and lectures across the U.S. and around the world over the past three years, he has often heard audience members say they wish de Vere's adventurous life could be brought to the screen. "I keep hearing that the Shakespearean mini-dramas, comedies and tragedies found within Edward de Vere's biography seem practically ready-made for movies or television," he says. "Well, to that we can now reply, 'The game's afoot.'"

Praise for "Shakespeare" By Another Name:
"Deserves serious attention" (The New York Times)
"Makes a compelling case... Especially impressive" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
"Quite a compelling argument" (The Chicago Sun-Times)
"One of the most fascinating theatre-related books I have ever read. An absolutely first-rate piece of sleuthing and an absolutely first-rate read." (Don Rubin, editor-in-chief of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre)
"Makes a convincing argument that the brilliant, rather tormented Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford -- not Shakespeare -- was the dramatist ... draws powerful connections between Shakespeare's plays and the life of de Vere." (USA Today)

On the web:
http://shakespearebyanothername.com/
http://shakespearebyanothername.blogspot.com/
http://tinyurl.com/5kgqn3
http://tinyurl.com/659erw

Why Coriolanus matters

Let's say, for argument's sake, that there's an American presidential candidate who appears to hold his country's electorate in such contempt that no stunt or lowly trick is beneath him or his advisors. Every new week only seems to bring new ways for him to display his unrivaled cynicism and to further debase the political process.

Well, in that case, do I have a play for you.

It's Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and it's not particularly well known or widely staged. That's unfortunate.

Here's an excerpt from a BBC production:



The snippet above comes from Act 3, Scene 1, in which the title character, a celebrated Roman war hero, scuttles a plan by the Roman Senate to provide some relief-- in the form of food handouts to a starving populace -- in a time of financial crisis. (Hmm.... no parallels here. Move on. Nothing to see.) Coriolanus calls the Roman populace "common fools" and "the mutable, rank-scented many." His derision for the public at large is matched by a vainglory and narcissism that can be almost uncomfortable to watch:

CORIOLANUS For the mutable, rank-scented many, let them
Regard me as I do not flatter, and
Therein behold themselves: I say again,
In soothing them, we nourish 'gainst our senate...
As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay against those measles,
Which we disdain should tatter us

It is, in fact, Coriolanus's Machiavellian disdain for his countrymen that makes the play so difficult to stage as it's typically presented: A tragedy. A tragedy requires that we somehow sympathize with the hero whose rise and later fall is the lifeblood of the play.

But Coriolanus is such a contemptible figure, and not nearly as fascinatingly contemptible as Richard III, that productions of this "tragedy" often fall flat.

The key to the play, though, is found in a quip by George Bernard Shaw. Coriolanus, Shaw said, "is the greatest of Shakespeare's comedies."


The weapons of satire, not tragedy, belong in the director's arsenal. Coriolanus himself gets only one soliloquy in the whole play, and a none too revealing one at that: The text reveals that we are not meant to care about the title character or his plight. He's a foil, not some misunderstood tragic figure.

The insightful critic Oscar J. Campbell, dissenting from standard views of this "tragedy," writes in his 1943 book Shakespeare's Satire that "Coriolanus exhibits over and over again his one ruling passion--the choler which Renaissance philosophers regarded as the inevitable result of wounded pride."

The Bard, Campbell elsewhere writes, "fills the tragedy so full of the spirit of derision that the play can be understood only if it be recognized as perhaps the most successful of Shakespeare's satiric plays."

I would only add, from a biographical p.o.v., that the Elizbethan historical inspiration for Coriolanus only underscores Shaw's and Campbell's biography-agnostic readings of the play. A haughty general called the Earl of Essex -- tremendously popular with the Elizabethan public -- was in the author's crosshairs. Edward de Vere hated Essex. Coriolanus is Essex's comeuppance.

But, in 2008, highlighting the Elizabethan parallels wouldn't be nearly as fun or fascinating as it would be to bring out the modern-day parallels, and let the audience judge for themselves.

My director's kit for an ideal modern-day production of Coriolanus, then, would be this: Campbell's book... and a chronicle of John McCain's greatest hits from the 2008 presidential campaign.

As one of the play's nameless lords observes of Coriolanus's downfall, "His own impatience takes... a great part of blame. Let's make the best of it."


UPDATED to clarify that I'm not advocating some sort of matrix of one-to-one parallels between Coriolanus and present-day events. There's a difference between a nod to topical interpretations and an airhorn that blasts it to anyone within earshot. Maybe a DVD of Robert Altman's dark satire M*A*S*H would be part of my ideal director's kit, too...

UPDATED AGAIN: If McCain-as-Coriolanus is the feature attraction, here's the sideshow:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.